Complete Guide For Python Programming (2015)

PYTHON VERSIONS

Python has many versions but most commonly used are Python 2.0 and Python 3.0. Python 2.0 was released on 16 October 2000, with many major new features including a full garbage collector and support for Unicode. With this release the development process was changed and became more transparent and community-backed. while Python 3.0 , which is also known as Python 3000 or py3k, is a major, backwards-incompatible release, and was released on 3 December 2008. Many of its major features have been back ported to the backwards-compatible Python 2.6 and 2.7. Python 2.x is legacy, Python 3.x is the present and future of the language.

Python 3.0 was released in 2008. The final 2.x version 2.7 release came out in mid-2010, with a statement of extended support for this end-of-life release. The 2.x branch will see no new major releases after that. 3.x is under active development and has already seen over five years of stable releases, including version 3.3 in 2012 and 3.4 in 2014. This means that all recent standard library improvements, for example, are only available by default in Python 3.x.

For those interested in using Python via a USB thumb drive, you may be interested in Portable Python. This is a self-contained Python environment that you can either run from the thumb drive or install to your computer. This is useful for people who can’t or don’t want to install Python but would still like to use it.